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So the AP n the Association for project managers have been developing the perfect way to plan and then

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do projects for the last hundred or 150 years they've written it all down in P.N. Baalke the project

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management body of knowledge and I've simplified that down to a 12 step process just for people who

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are doing a small project or just want to get on with doing project management.

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These are the key 12 parts of the A.P.M. process.

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So if you follow this approach this project management process you should be fine.

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Your project should come in on time on budget and correct to the specification.

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Step One of the process is to define what your project is.

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Be really clear about what you are doing.

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And I think Step 1 is the biggest cause of failure for projects if you leave it a bit vague.

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There is a risk that when you deliver it people are going to say well that's not what I was imagining

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or that's not what I wanted.

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So to all agree all the stakeholders agree in writing this is what we're going to have cost quality

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and time.

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This is how much we're going to spend.

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This is what we're going to have in scope and out of scope and also how long is it going to take.

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So Step 1 define the project that's really important don't overlook that.

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Then you start on the planning steps two to eight are all about having a really good plan.

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So the first part of planning step two is to get a list of all the tasks and there is a slight question

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about how much granularity to have how small do you go.

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Do you just say I'm going to build a house or go to do the kitchen got to do the bathroom the foundations

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the roof or do you divide the kitchen down into you know the cooker and the heated floor and the lights.

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Or do you go even more detail to use and when a drill hole push the wire through.

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So there's a slight question about how detailed to go.

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But Step two is to get a list of all the tasks then.

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Step three is to estimate those tasks and there are two things to estimate the time and the money.

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So how long do we think each task will take to do and what will it cost to do.

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And just to clarify what I mean by time because there are two types of time we have to decide how many

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hours of work are involved and we've got to estimate that.

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But also the elapsed time how many weeks til it's finished.

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And those are different things.

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Sometimes people talk about DAY.

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I'm suspicious about days because if you say well it's a three day job do you mean it's three days of

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work or do you mean it's three days of elapsed time till it's finished.

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So I like to use hours of work and then weeks of elapsed time.

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So I would talk about estimating the time and the money the time is the elapsed time three weeks.

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The money is the hours of work plus other costs.

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So Step three is to do your estimating step four.

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And I'm going to show you this in a bit more detail later.

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Step forward is to work out the running order of the tasks.

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And this is usually called a network diagram.

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What order are we going to do the tasks in Step four is really the heart of your planning process.

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That's when you really decide you know are we going to risk buying a building when we haven't got a

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permit for that country or are we going to get the furniture before the manager.

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Does the manager need to have a say in the furniture.

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So Step four is where we think about the interconnections the dependencies between the tasks and we

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draw it all out in order.

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And it also tells us therefore how long the project's going to take because we can add up the times.

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So that's step four then Step Five is to speed up that diagram if necessary because if you add up all

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the tasks and it comes to too much then how do we speed it up or we can do that by overlapping some

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of the tasks or throwing money at them that kind of thing.

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Then we get to step six which is the Gantt Chart.

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Now again I'm going to talk about these more later.

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But the Gantt chart is basically a series of bars drawn out with the right length so you have you have

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a time scale on your diagram.

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And so you show each task as a bar and then you can see the whole project drawing out as a series of

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bars.

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So that's the Gantt Chart.

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Step Seven of the 12 step process is then to think about resources because if you've got several bars

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all happening at the same time you can look vertically and you can ask yourself Do we have enough resource

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to do everything that we want to do on this project.

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And we've either got to get more people or perhaps we'll have to move some of those bars later and take

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longer.

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So Step Seven is to think about the resources for your project and perhaps also for all of your projects

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because what if we've got enough for that project.

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But unfortunately at the same time as that we've got a couple of other projects happening.

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So I have a thing called the ganta of Gants where you look at all your projects and you just check that.

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Can we do all the things that we want to do in this time scale.

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So at Step 7.

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Think about the resources you need for one project and for multiple projects.

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Then the final step of the planning is Step 8 which is risk.

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So you look at your whole plan and you think what might go wrong with this project.

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How likely is it to go wrong.

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How serious would it be if it did go wrong and how can we make it less likely or less serious.

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So risk and mitigation of risk is Step 8 so that steps 2 to 8 of the 12.

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And that's the planning stage of project management.

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We then start the project.

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Remember if you're doing an gyle you plan and do plan and do plan and do but what we're doing with the

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A.P.M. process is that we plan the whole thing and then we do the whole thing.

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And you can see how there are benefits and risks of that because there is a risk we all spend ages planning

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and when you do the first bet you'll find there's something wrong with your plan.

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But if you do plan do plan do then you don't have an overall view of the project and you don't know

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how long it's going to take.

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So the A.P.M. have decided to do all the planning.

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Make sure it's right and then you carry out your plan.

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So Step 9 as you carry out your plan you monitor your progress and that's normally done by coloring

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in the Gantt chart I'm going to show you this later color in so that you can check the keeping up with

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your plan.

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And so that is Step 9 Step 10 is where you monitor the money.

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So you keep track of how much you've spent.

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And again you have to look at whether what you have spent compares favorably with what you should spend

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and if you're overspending you can work out what to do.

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Step 11 is where we adjust our plan if necessary.

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So if we are running behind or overspending at Step 11 we think right what are we going to do about

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that.

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And of course things always change doing projects.

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Sometimes it's outside factors.

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Sometimes it's the customer asking for something else but for whatever reason things change during projects

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and so step 11 is where we rejig the plan.

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And this is where agile people say are well you see you know your process isn't very flexible but actually

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it's really flexible because we know we're going to be changing the plan at Step 11.

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We've got a whole stack for that and we're absolutely fine with that.

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We know that no battle plan withstands contact with the enemy.

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But the good thing about having a plan is that if you have to change it you know the effect of the change.

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So if a customer says oh can I have an extra page on that website.

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You could say absolutely no problem at all to do that.

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But it will take a bit longer and it will cost a bit more.

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Compared to the original plan at Step 11.

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And then finally step 12 is to review the project at the end.

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What have we learnt.

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Often forgotten very important because it's really the only time that you learn.

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You know you think you'll remember for next time but will you.

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So Step 12 is where you write down everything you've learned and you store all your reviews in a folder

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so that anybody different to you who might be doing a similar project to the one you did can look in

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the folder and learn the lessons.

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So even if you've learnt it the challenges for the whole organization to learn those lessons and you

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can do that if you keep a folder of reviews.

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So that's the A.P.M. process and you can see it's four sections really is defining the project.

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It's planning the project it's monitoring the project and it's reviewing it at the end.

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So that's the ideal way that you would do your project.

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But the big question really is what tends to go wrong.